The Dog Days of summer are making teachers unions sweat as they get caught being, well, teachers unions

August has been a bad month for teachers unions. And looking at things objectively, it would appear that every one of their hot flashes has been well deserved. In no particular order:

The SOS March was a dud. It was supposed to be a teacher-led event, but the unions were really behind it. The small turnout had its share of angry, mostly leftist teachers whining and shouting about this and that. No one paid much attention. The speakers were just what you’d expect. Jonathan Kozol, forty years later, is still railing about poverty causing ignorance. (No, actually ignorance causes poverty.) Then the marchers were treated to former reformer and current union mouthpiece Diane Ravitch who chirped about how wonderful they all were. And then the big gun, Matt Damon, who if nothing else showed what a great actor he is. The guy who played a convincing genius in Good Will Hunting demonstrates that without a good script he’s about as sharp as a marble.

The MacIver Institute of Wisconsin has been doing stellar work on the situation between the unions and the rest of Wisconsin since Governor Scott Walker first entered the Governor’s mansion. The Institute has really shown the thuggery that is the unions again and again, revealing them for what they are.

Well, MacIver has done it again… or rather the unions have done it again.

Governor Walker had planned a visit to the Messmer Preparatory School in Milwaukee, a school that exemplifies what good education is. After all, 85% of the students that graduate from Messmer end up graduating from college.Read more

Time for being shocked, shocked about teacher union methods and objectives is over.

Last week, writer Rishawn Biddle broke a story about the American Federation of Teachers’ recent successful actions to neuter a Parent Trigger bill in Connecticut. The first Parent Trigger law, officially the Parent Empowerment Act, was passed in California early last year. It allows parents, via a petition, to force change in the governance of a failing school should the petitioners get a majority of parents to sign on.

The educational establishment – school boards, teachers unions and other special interest groups, dubbed the “Government Education Complex” by Bruno Behrend, director of the Center for School Reform at The Heartland Institute, don’t like the law since it allows a group of parents to trump their power.

Most writers and bloggers who have written about the incident have focused on a pdf, originally a PowerPoint, posted on the AFT website, which very honestly and cynically describes the process by which the union did its dirty work. Realizing that this display of raw union power was not in keeping with its persona as a reform-minded partner, always willing to collaborate with parents, communities and other stakeholders, AFT pulled the pdf from its website shortly after the Biddle piece was posted and started to play defense…sort of.Read more

National Education Association declares war, but finding allies could be difficult

It’s hardly a secret that the National Education Association is an organization that has had its political way for the past 35 or so years. However, voters are fed up with the union’s attempts to keep a failing public education system from being reformed and having massive debt foisted on them in the form of public employee pensions. In November, the populace voted flinty governors and no-nonsense legislators into state houses all over the country.

Clearly NEA, to maintain its hegemony, must now combat the reform fires that are spreading wildly from sea to shining sea. But according to teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the megaunion is indeed going to war with not as much money as they once had. “… after some 27 years of increases, NEA membership is down in 43 states. The union faces a $14 million budget shortfall, and the demand for funds from its Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund is certain to exceed its supply. Even the national UniServ grants, which help pay for NEA state affiliate employees, will be reduced this year.”

Weingarten is schooled by WSJ’s Jason Riley; Van Roekel is clueless as usual.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of teachers represent over 4.5 million teachers and educational support workers across the United States. These two unions have been under attack for the past few years by reformers who point to their slavish clinging to the status quo as a major barrier to badly needed education reform.

Since the election in November when American citizens voted forward thinking legislators and governors into office, education reform has made great strides across the country. The elected officials have been attacking the union’s sacred cows with a ferocity that hasn’t been seen before – eliminating seniority and tenure, introducing merit pay, defining teacher accountability, more school choice programs, etc. are all on the agenda.Read more

NEA’s reprehensible sexual agenda goes on unabated and the MSM is MIA.

At a time when teachers’ unions are battling for their collective bargaining lives, courtesy of Governors Scott Walker, Chris Christie, John Kasich et al., it’s hard to go a day without reading a newspaper account of the latest union news. However, there is a story involving the National Education Association that has flown under the mainstream media radar.

I could not find a single MSM account of a talk given at a UN conference on March 3rd where Diane Schneider, representing the NEA at the “Commission on the Status of Women” said:Read more

Even as it tops the list of organizations spending money on political causes, the National Education Association (NEA) is planning to double the amount of its members’ dues spent on politics so that it can spend yet more on political campaigns — and all left-wing causes to boot.

Last year the NEA teachers union spent over $56 million on left-wing political causes but that is not enough according to union’s leadership. They want more. In 2010 the NEA took $10 from each member and spent that amount on its political activism. Going forward the NEA has announced that it will hike that amount to $20 per member.

The spending hike supposedly has a five-year sunset time limit on it, but as Mike Antonucci notes, the last time such a hike was proposed it also had a sunset provision but that provision was never implemented.

This raise in political spending comes at a time when the NEA has seen membership fall by some 54,000 members and found a $14 million shortfall in its general operating budget.

One wonders how members feel whose organization can’t even pay its bills but is doubling its spending on politics?Read more

What is happening in Wisconsin right now could prove to be a turning point in the fight against big government. Democrat State Senators in the state of Wisconsin have decided that the public sector unions are more important than representative democracy and the consent of the people. The voters in Wisconsin elected a Republican Governor, U.S. Senator and state legislature in November, but the Democrats don’t appear to think elections matter. The public sector unions are proving they are only interested in one thing: power.

Increasingly all over the country, Democrats and the unions are trying to create mayhem and disorder in hopes that hardworking taxpayers will just give up. But we’re not going to give up. We need to stand with Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.Read more

Once upon a time, school choice became a reality in our nation’s capital. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allowed some poor kids in D.C. to go to private schools with the help of a government stipend, was ushered in by a Republican controlled Congress in January 2004. Earlier this year, Jason Richwine at the Heritage Foundation wrote,

Congress put school vouchers to the test in 2004 when it authorized the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP), a federally funded voucher program serving low-income students in the nation’s capital. It has awarded $7,500 scholarships to more than 3,700 students over the past six years.”Read more

The National Education Association (NEA) is the premier teachers union group in the country. As such it is instructive to learn the sort of reading material that the biggest of all teachers unions tells its own members to study so that they can more adequately represent teachers in America today.

A look at the NEA website reveals a shocking recommendation to its members. The union that represents the teachers that we send our children to every school day suggests that its members read the communist-like manifesto of famed left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky.

That’s right, the NEA wants its members, America’s teachers, to become programmed by the ideas and policy prescriptions in a communist manifesto.Read more

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-By Larry Sand
The Dog Days of summer are making teachers unions sweat as they get caught being, well, teachers unions
August has been a bad month for teachers unions. And looking at things objectively, it would appear that every one of their hot flashes has been well deserved. In no particular order: